Ingredients

2 tb EVOO (or canola oil)
2 tsp cumin
1 large onion, chopped coarsely
2-4 jalapenos, seeded and chopped coarsely
6 medium garlic cloves, chopped coarsely
2 lbs. 80/20 ground beef chuck
2 cups red wine (e.g., shiraz, merlot, malbec)
3 tb chili powder (preferably Penzey’s Hot Chili, Chili 3000, or Chili 9000 powder)
1/2 7oz can of chipotle peppers in adobo sauce, chopped
2 cups finely diced carrots
2 cups beef stock (preferably low-sodium or unsalted)
2 16oz cans of diced, unsalted tomatoes
3 16oz cans of red kidney beans (unseasoned or chili-seasoned)
1 8oz can of tomato sauce (optional, if you want more liquid)
1 6oz can of tomato paste
salt to taste
Fiesta-blend shredded cheese
Sour cream

Recipe

1. Prepare the onions, jalapenos, garlic, and carrots. Thaw beef. Open cans. Etc. Depending on your speed and skill, some of this can be done in between the following steps.
2. Heat the extra virgin olive oil in an 8 quart pot on medium, then cook the cumin in the oil for a minute or so until they start to turn brown and smoke (don’t burn them!).
3. Add onions and sauté until they start to caramelize, then add jalapeno and garlic and saute for a few more minutes.
4. Add thawed ground beef. Break the beef up with a spatula and mix everything together. Cook until meat is browned.
5. I started this step about 25 minutes in from the start of step 2: Add red wine, chili powder, and chipotle peppers in adobo sauce. Cook down the liquid for about 5 minutes. Note: Adjust jalapeno, garlic, chili powder, and chipotle peppers in adobo quantities depending on your level of wussiness.
6. Add beef stock, tomatoes, beans, tomato sauce and paste. Mix everything together and cook for 30-60 minutes, stirring occasionally, to cook off as much liquid as necessary to reach your desired consistency/thickness. Salt to taste. Note: If you use unseasoned kidney beans, you might need more chili powder and/or chipotle peppers in adobo.
7. Garnish with sour cream and fiesta-blend shredded cheese (optional).

Prep time: 15-30 minutes; cook time: 60-90 minutes.

Serves 8-12, or a few over several days, I guesstimate.

So I’ve gone and moved my website to a new domain name, from gaplauche.com to gaplauche.com. The new blog url is now, of course, gaplauche.com/blog/. No need for any ‘www’ prefix.

I figure the new domain is more professional and SEO-friendly.

I could have kept the same Feedburner url, but decided instead to make it match the new domain name. So if you’re reading this post on one of my old rss feeds, you’ll need to change your subscription url to http://feeds.feedburner.com/gaplauche if you want to keep following my blog. I’ll soon be deactivating the old ones.

All of the old gaplauche.com urls should redirect automatically to their gaplauche.com counterparts. Please let me know if you run into any trouble in this regard.

I suppose now I should start blogging here more, eh?

Most of my blogging lately has been going on over at The Libertarian Standard and Prometheus Unbound.

I may cross-post from time to time, but I don’t want this blog to consist merely of duplicate content. So please do follow those sites if you aren’t already — TLS for general news, commentary, and analysis from an Austro-Libertarian perspective; Prometheus Unbound for news and reviews of fiction, primarily science fiction and fantasy, from a libertarian perspective. Oh, and we’re looking for more contributors to Prometheus Unbound, if you’re interested.

Last week I launched a new website called Prometheus Unbound.  I aim for it to be a sort of online “magazine,” a libertarian review of fiction and literature. The site will feature reviews, news commentary, articles and editorials, and eventually (I hope) interviews, from a libertarian perspective. I’m entertaining the possibility of publishing original fiction in the undetermined future, but won’t be doing so anytime soon.

I’ve already got a number of posts up, some old and republished from other sites, some new. I’m hoping this won’t be a one-man show, so I’m looking for some regular writers as well as submissions from irregular or part-time contributors. There are already a few others on board, so you should start to see posts from them before long. If you’re interested in contributing a review, news commentary, or the like, contact me.

You can learn more about Prometheus Unbound, my reasons for creating it, and what I’m looking for in submissions by starting with my introductory post. I’m particularly interested in science fiction and fantasy prose fiction, but Prometheus Unbound will be open to submissions dealing with just about any genre or medium, including film, tv, comics and graphic novels, and poetry.

~*~

Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

After completing a major redesign of The Libertarian Standard site, I decided to do the same thing to my much-neglected personal site as well.

Most of the changes I made there, I made here. There are a few exceptions since I don’t have quite the same setup as TLS. I have a separate front/landing page and blog page, whereas the blog page is the front page there. I don’t publish articles here. I use some sidebar widgets here that we don’t use on TLS, and vice versa. But you’ll notice I moved to a 2-column layout and added a Blog Archives page and a Tag Cloud page. I didn’t bother adding a Popular page, because I just don’t get enough traffic yet to justify it. Someday I might.

Sidebar widgets have been moved around, for the most part only appearing on pages in which they are relevant and useful for what the reader is presumably doing on said page. Hopefully, you’ll find the layout to be cleaner, more useful, and the site to load faster.

I still need to work on properly categorizing and tagging my old blogposts; the legacy of moving my blog from Blogger to self-hosted WordPress after several hundred posts. There are still many formerly-internal links in my old posts that link back to posts on my old Blogger blog, which I have set up to redirect back here. One day maybe I’ll get around to fixing them.

Anyway, I’ll continue to make minor changes and improvements over time, but the major ones have been accomplished.  What do you think?

The song was written in 1971 by Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, a long-time resident of Slidell, Louisiana.

Live 04/16/83 in Hamburg, Germany: Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown (guitar/vocals), Homer Brown (tenorsax), Bill Samuell (tenorsax), Joe Sunseri (baritonesax), Craig Wroten (piano), Miles Wright (bass), Robert Shipley (drums).

HT Dick Clark for bringing this to my attention.

~*~

Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

From Wired.com comes news of the US Army’s latest spy mobile — a high altitude, long-duration flight, combat airship, ominously nicknamed “The Unblinking Eye.” This sweet ride and its two sister blimps will cost taxpayers upwards of half a billion dollars. The 5-year contract calls for mere $517 million, and we all know military contractors never experience cost overruns.

I love Noah Shachtman’s analysis of the propagandistic publicity poster by Northrop Grumman, the maker of the Army’s latest war toy:

God smiles when the Army spends a half-billion dollars on spy blimps the size of a football field. I believe that’s the message Northrop Grumman is trying to convey in this illustration. . .

The first airship is supposed to be inflated around 10 months from now. Eight months later, the Army hopes to have the first LEMV flying over Afghanistan. On that day, the clouds will part, the sun will shine, and the cherubs will sing as the unblinking eye begins looking for Taliban.

God bless America indeed.

The Unblinking Eyes of Sauron are intended for use over foreign soil. But with the increasing militarization of US borders and police, I wonder how long until they or their successors are deployed over our own heads? looking for brown-skinned interlopers, pot growers, and terrorists under every rock.

I’m reminded of a couple of pieces by heavy metal bands, though these work just as well for spy satellites. The first is a creepy intro, “An Eye Is Upon You,” by Powerman 5000 for their album Tonight the Stars Revolt! And the second is “Electric Eye” by one of my favorite bands, Judas Priest (their compilation album Metal Works is a good place to start).

Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

There’s a new anti-war rock/hip-hop song hitting the air waves lately. It is called White Flag Warrior, from the album Survival Story, by Flobots and featuring Tim McIlrath of the punk rock band Rise Against. It’s a catchy tune with good lyrics, melding both rock and hip hop elements. The song has a definite non-violent resistance ring to it. The oft repeated line that “we’d rather make our children martyrs than murderers” reminds me of the Socratic position that it is better to suffer injustice than to commit it — truly libertarian sentiments.

Music video and lyrics below:

Lyrics

We request to negotiate
We come to you unarmed
We desire to communicate
You cannot do us harm

They want sacrifice
They hatch schemes and ask me to follow their path to the afterlife

I’ve got an appetite
For nice things and pipe dreams that my enemies could be blasted by

New metaphors
View that are better for you can’t survive if I’m your competitor

Rise together or fight separate wars
I pray I’m never forced to be a predator

Spectres spectate
We wont last
They glad to hate
When gladiators
Breathe their last
Scream en masse
When the dreams do clash
Like the swords in the wars
Let me bleed on that
But they feed on that
Say we need strong backs
Call us weak
If we don’t redeem contracts
But the feast wont last
When this beast attacks
The sons and the fathers
Will be free at last

This is love this is not treason

They see sharks in the estuary
They claim the arc’s Bartholomew’s
They say war is necessary
But we say war is child abuse

We’d rather make our children martyrs than murderers
We’d rather make our children White Flag Warriors

Core-to-core
Were the ones
We’ve been waiting for
We hold steady
Steadier than stevedores
Not tevias or matadors
On matters of what came before
Forgive the debts
To settle scores
Test the mettle
Either ore
Whats your plan got to do with me
If the bell tolls let freedom ring
And find new ways if we must be King
Instead of leading the young to our suffering

We pass testaments down scream back at heaven
For testing us like Wednesdays at eleven
Wanna recruit and train us to act evilly?
Save it for the shooting range and smack DVDs
Won’t study war no more this millennium
It’s never again to me or anyone
So think harder when you refer to us
Rather make our children martyrs than murderers

They shell dwellings to quell the shelling
They lift taboos to seduce the cowards
They say we’re too yellow-bellied
But we say we’re the new superpower

We seek waivers to not be liable
We claim to speak for a higher truth
We stand opposed to the homicidal
We tell you you’re fireproof

***

Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

This is not a real Mediterranean recipe. I just made it up. I like it because it’s simple, easy to make, consists of just good meat, cheese and bread, and tastes good.

Ingredients

• 1 mini-sub roll (a small, slender 6″ sub-shaped roll; I like Asiago cheese rolls)
• deli-style, thinly-sliced smoked ham (Hillshire Farm is good)
• pizza-style pepperoni, for some spicy kick (I like Armour)
• goat cheese

Recipe

1. Slice the roll in half lengthwise. Optional: Heat the roll in the oven at 350°F for a few minutes first until the crust gets a little crispy.
2. Slather the goat cheese generously on the insides of both halves of the roll. It helps to let the goat cheese warm up a bit ahead of time as goat cheese can be really crumbly and hard to spread when cold.


(Click to enlarge.)

3. Put down an overlapping layer of pepperoni slices on the bottom half of the roll. The rolls I like are just wide enough for one row of pepperoni.
4. Pile on 2-3 layers of thin deli-style smoked ham, say 6-9 slices. Don’t lay ‘em out flat, cafeteria-style. I like to twist or fold them for greater volume and texture.
5. Put the top half of the roll on, and maybe slice the roll in half widthwise. Enjoy!

There’s a new website and group blog in town, by a great group of radical Austro-Libertarians, including yours truly. It’s The Libertarian Standard. I’ve been pre-occupied with admin work for the site the past couple weeks, getting it set up and looking nice, but I’ll be getting around to blogging relatively soon. I’ll probably be doing a lot of cross-posting between TLS and here. Hopefully TLS will help break my blogging dry spell. In the meantime, check out the introductory post and the About page as well as all the great posts already published by my fellow TLS bloggers. We’ve also got a Twitter account (libstandard) and a Twitter list of tweeting TLS contributors as well as a Facebook fan page set up. I hope you enjoy our work!

Ingredients

• 1      6-oz can frozen orange juice concentrate, thawed
• 1      6-oz can frozen pineapple juice concentrate, thawed
• 1      cup  catsup
• 4      tablespoons lemon juice
• 3      teaspoons cayenne pepper (less if you’re a pansy, more if you like)
• 4      tablespoons quick-cooking tapioca
• 2      2-inch stick cinnamon
• 16    whole allspice
• 8      whole cloves
• 2      15-oz cans diced tomatoes, drained
• 3-5  medium carrots, chopped thinly into disks
• 3      pounds boneless chicken breasts, cut into small to medium-sized pieces
• Hot, cooked couscous.

Recipe

1. To make sauce, in a medium-sized bowl combine the juice concentrate, catsup, lemon juice, cayenne pepper and tapioca. Pour into 3.5-4 quart slow cooker.
2. Make a spice bag by placing cinnamon, allspice and cloves in 100% cotton cheese cloth and tying the package closed with clean kitchen string. Beats having to fish the whole spices out of the finished product one by one when it’s time to serve. Put this in the slow cooker as well.
3. Peel and chop carrots. Open and drain cans of tomatoes. Add to cooker.
4. Prepare the chicken (thaw, clean, cut, etc.), then place in the cooker. Stir.
5. Cover. Cook on low-heat setting approximately 9 hours, high heat setting approximately 4.5 hours. I find this dish tastes best when cooked on low for 9 hours. The chicken browns turns brown and absorbs all the flavors. It’s mouth watering.
6. Discard spice bag. Serve over couscous. Optional substitution: Serve over basmati rice.

(Click to enlarge.)